S
smcder
Guest
Can I make a bold request? Can you include somewhere in your story the following sentence or some form of it?:
The sentence is not written in English.
There is something like that idea already in it.
NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!
>
Can I make a bold request? Can you include somewhere in your story the following sentence or some form of it?:
The sentence is not written in English.
3) It could be true.
I think this will be a magnificent book, Steve, and I'm looking forward to reading it, including reading partial installments you post here. The more the better. I do suggest, however, that you send the parts of the ms written so far (including some of the descriptions of the book you've posted here) and the provisional table of contents and title to the US copyright office post haste. Like tomorrow.
It's playing with the idea of information and meaning. There is the meaning intended by the author of the sentence — the information that was intended to be encoded, but the meaning received by the reader may be, will be, different.2. is written in some other language ... but then the sentence:
This sentence is not written in English.
very probably doesn't mean "This sentence is not written in English."
... so, how else could it be "true"?
It's playing with the idea of information and meaning. There is the meaning intended by the author of the sentence — the information that was intended to be encoded, but the meaning received by the reader may be, will be, different.
I also like: Contrary to your assumption, this sentence is not written in English.
If there are infinite multiple universes, isn't it possible there is a language in which such a sentence could be written that had a completely different meaning and only appeared to be an English sentence?
What is the the most ambiguous sentence that can be formulated in English I wonder?
Yes, haha, that's it! (The previous sentence was English just to be clear haha.)But you wouldn't be able to determine that from the isolated sentence - so with no other information it would be an English sentence to an English speaker. Otherwise, we should suspect every piece of written material. And in fact, when the aliens come it could be that they will read everything in every book on the planet to mean something else. Moby Dick could be an instruction manual for disabling nuclear power plants.
Thix brogba this malwit tunga not. This sentence is not written in English. Garwick written fazzzil waad.
Fascinating!!! Thank you for posting this, Flipper. It inspires me to read Vedantic and Yogic texts and perhaps even to pursue their practices. That state of dreamless sleep, that lowest not-quite-'contentless' state, seems to me to signify pure presence, a sense of pure being. Husserl was therefore wrong to claim "no consciousness but by virtue of/in awareness of things" as a corollary of "no things but in consciousness." I want to read Thompson's new book on this neurophenomenological research.
If you read these texts let me know what you think ...
I have ordered it also!I will. First I want to read Thompson's new book and follow the sources he cites in the process. Here's the amazon page on this book:
Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy: Evan Thompson, Stephen Batchelor: 9780231137096: Amazon.com: Books
Awhile back, I posted an article from the NYT called "Are We Really Conscious?" which was needlessly provocative and introduced Michael Graziano's "Attention Schema" theory of consciousness. Based on an article I recently read about the potential important role of metacognition in the realization of conscious (subjective) experience, I sought out two additional articles/papers by Graziano about his theory, and I it does fit the data and has some explanatory power. There is also some interesting evidence to support it. However, I feel that Graziano does a poor job of explaining his theory in all three papers I've read.
Thus, Graziano does not think consciousness is epiphenomenal.
You see the "trade off" though, and it's one that I've already made. If consciousness ontologically consists of a non-physical substance, then it won't have causal influence on the body. However, it appears that consciousness does have causal influence on the body (we're able to verbally report our conscious experiences). Therefore, consciousness must be physical.
[The needlessly provocative aspect of Graziano's writing is that be suggesting we don't really have subjective experience, what he seems to be saying is that the subjective experience isn't a dual, non-physical substance but rather is information generated by the brain. Thus I think it's needlessly provocative to say we don't really have subjective experience -- even Graziano says we can verbally report on it; what he should really straightforwardly say is that subjective experience is information generated in the brain, as I don't think either word -- subjective nor experience -- implies a dual substance per se.)
But what about the hard problem? How can consciousness be physical? Answer: it's information.*
As Bob Doyle so eloquently explains, information can be described as purely physical (information must be embodied in and communicated via a physical substrate); but information is not ontologically the same as the physical substrate it is embodied by. In that sense, information can be considered non-physical.
I understand that the theory that all consciousness -- all mind -- is information is not proven. However, I think the idea has a lot of support. Also, from what I can gather, those who subscribe to this idea seem to believe that self-aware consciousness occurs on the scale of neurons. (But that's not to say that all processes leading to self-aware consciousness occur on the neuronal scale.)
I'll post the two articles I recently read of his and a third about metacognition's potential role in subjective experience soon.
*This raises another question though: Why does information feel like something? More on that later.
But what about the hard problem? How can consciousness be physical? Answer: it's information.*